• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 636 0

desperately,” Klein says. “We went to every investment bank in the city.” There were no takers. Prudential began actively looking for buyers in 1995; it wasn’t hard by then, because the market had turned up once again. Douglas Durst, who had been one of the chief litigants in earlier years, and who had quietly subsidized other opponents of the development, now purchased the right to develop the biggest and most desirable parcel, the one at the northeast corner of 42nd Street and Broadway known as 4 Times Square. The Rudin family, one of the city’s ancient real estate clans, and Boston Properties, owned by the publisher Mort Zuckerman, bought the three other parcels. Prudential escaped with a small profit.

Only George Klein was left a loser. Klein virtually stopped building after the debacle of 42nd Street. He was hoping to work with Prince Charles, that arbiter of conservative architectural tastes, to rebuild the district of London, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, that was destroyed in the Blitz—but this project, too, fell through when the market sagged. An undemonstrative man, Klein is stoical in the aftermath of defeat. “It was,” he says, with a small smile, “an interesting lesson to learn.” Klein feels that the real hero of 42nd Street is not Rebecca Robertson or Robert Stern, but Prudential, for—while the developers for the mart and the theaters and the hotel decamped—the company stuck with the project, patiently laying out the money that made the revival of the street possible. “I think developers have some civic responsibility,” says Klein. “It isn’t just squeeze the last nickel.” He makes it clear that he is referring to figures like the Milsteins and the Dursts, who used litigation to block the project. He has, he feels, nothing to be embarrassed about. “I don’t think anyone ever said that we didn’t keep our word or have integrity or do our best,” he says. “We could differ about what ‘best’ means architecturally.” One cannot dispute this judgment.

IN SO FAR AS THE 42nd Street Development Project worked, it did so by failing. Public officials accepted a bid to build four enormous office towers in the heart of Manhattan before the developer had even chosen an architect, much less showed a model; and when the architect ignored the guidelines they had laid down to ensure that the buildings conformed to the civic ideals they had in mind, the guidelines were quietly discarded. Only public pressure forced a change in design. And then litigation, against which city and state officials were powerless, prevented the new design from being implemented. The collapse of the real estate market killed the office towers altogether. And the developers who had agreed to build the merchandise mart and the hotel, and to restore the theaters, slunk away one by one; one of them, a former Koch administration figure named Michael Lazar, who had won the bid to restore the five theaters on the north side of the block although he had no prior theatrical experience, was indicted, and later convicted and jailed, for accepting kickbacks while in office. These failures turned the street into the sort of blank slate that made the 42nd Street Now! plan possible.

Could it have been otherwise? Let’s imagine two alternative scenarios, which may be thought of more or less as the marketplace and statist scenarios. Both free market conservatives, who consider New York’s development process far too intrusive, and some real estate officials argue that the city would have been much better off had it simply waited for 42nd Street to become attractive to private development. Had the city done nothing at all to 42nd Street save make it as clean and safe as possible, the argument goes, development would have inevitably shifted westward as costs became prohibitive east of Fifth. Forty-second Street would have had its office towers just as Seventh Avenue and Broadway did. They would have been less dense, and perhaps there would have been fewer of them; whatever revenue the city lost would be made up for by the fact that the owners would be paying their full share